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Sunday, September 2, 2012

How I Store My Polish - Very Picture Heavy

Right, first of all, ye know how much I ramble, and I have 18 pictures ready to go. You might want to go make coffee. Click the pictures for a closer look if you're as nosey as I am.

A few weeks ago, I reached my patience limit with my old storage unit. It was crammed with polish and it took me ages to find anything. Proof? Here:

After debating for a long time whether or not to make the trip to IKEA for a Helmer, I saw this on the Littlewoods website. Of COURSE it's on sale now, when I paid stupid money for it, AAAAGH! Sickened.

Anyway, here it is, it's massive and it came with wheels but I didn't bother with them, I see no reason to be lugging a giant storage unit around.

What won me over were the two little drawers on the top, they're perfect for nail art stuff and non-polish things. Here's drawer number one:

Nail tips, brushes, skewers, acrylic paints, acrylic nail set (with a liquid that should be banished to the seventh level of hell where it belongs, smell of it - my son calls it the liquid of death) and my little embellishment case (bought from Cork Art Supplies along with the acrylic paint & brushes). Here's a look at the case:

I use it for glitters, glequins, tape, tip guides, microbeads, eyes (don't ask), bows, tips for the practice finger, etc. I love the little bottles, I picked some glitter ones up on eBay a while back and I was sent some amazing bar glitters & mixed glitters from the lovely Jenna in a recent swap, which I'll post about soon.

Now for the polish - some polishes (like Essence Colour & Go or Revlon) are easily recognisable by the top of their caps. Others are not (hello Catrice). So, I divided all my polish up by brand, then labelled them all starting with the number one. As I was labelling, I got some card, punched holes in the sides, put some ribbon through (so I can add more pages) and made a swatch book.

This took an obscene amount of time and I was praying that nobody would come in and see it - one of himself's sisters was once shocked by the amount of nail polish I owned and there were only 11 on the table - I fear I would be sectioned if anyone saw them all laid out. Wanna see some pages?

It's already made life so much easier, when I fancy a particular colour now I can just have a look at my swatches and then find the number! I label & swatch each new polish as I get it. Here's big drawer one:

It started off as mostly Essence, OPI minis, Tony Moly, Stargazer & other randoms but to be honest every drawer is a bit of a mish-mash. Big drawer two:

Catrice, Polish remover, and basically anything I've recently bought or received in a swap. The other three drawers are for skin stuff and makeup that I don't use on a daily basis (I have a little make-up bag for my everyday stuff).

The second has lipstick, lip pencils, lipbalm (that giant lollipop thing is a Chupa Chups lipgloss probably aimed at children, but hey) and brushes, primer, eyeliner.

The last one has foundation, eyeshadow, palettes, false lashes, bronzer, blusher, mascara.

While I was at it, I said I'd take a couple more storage pictures - here's earring/perfume storage and my old polish tower which now houses the empty OPI mini boxes (yes, I kept them, I'm weird), hair rollers, moisturizer, bracelets, big jewellery.

Good job himself doesn't have much stuff, isn't it? That little box on top of the Glamour magazines was from a Christmas present, it contained 6 polishes from Fearne Cotton's collection for Boots. I use it to store my rings & some chains and apparently a dice, no idea why that's in there.

And lastly, is limbo, or the box that I throw stuff into when I find it in places it shouldn't be. This is just basically a big box of stuff that I should really organise but can't be bothered to:

And there you have it. How I store my polish and other things. Go have a lie down, you deserve it for getting to the end.

Oh I am so jealous of your collection! I've just sent a link to the other half so he can see that my collection is actually minuscule. Just a few teensie glossyboxes full. The swatch book is a great idea, definitely a stealer!

What a fantastic collection and storage system! Loving your swatch book! And I totally get you with not wanting non polish addict people to know just how many you have. I once had gotten some nail mail about 8-10 bottles and they were just sitting on the table. People called to the house and saw it and were like you have loads of polish! Yeah......that's all I have. xx

Love this storage idea! I've been trying to devise a good storage option for a while now, mine are in a complete state of disarray! Love the swatch book idea :) for mine I bought a LOT of nail wheels and labelled the wheels with a number, and wrote down the order of polishes on each wheel in a little notebook :D Sooo much easier than trying to find a certain colour that you know you have something similar but you aren't sure what it is haha. I love the cabinet, must find myself something similar! xx

Wow, what a great collection! Love your storage and swatch book idea! My storage looks like in you first picture, I have to do something soon, because I am sure that with the time I will buy more polishes and I need to order them properly, if I want to find each of them :)

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